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"The Myers-Briggs is useful for one thing: entertainment. There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking the test as a fun, interesting activity, like a BuzzFeed quiz." - or like one of those "Which LoR characters are you" tests.

"There's just no evidence behind it," says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who's written about the shortcomings of the Myers-Briggs previously. "The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you'll be in a situation, how you'll perform at your job, or how happy you'll be in your marriage."

In a Washington Post article, Does it pay to know your type? Lillian Cunningham asks whether we can send the MBTI back to the factory for some refurbishing. The response from Little: “It’s a little bit like taking a Dodge Caravan and trying to turn it into a Rolls Royce.” Instead, psychologists have spent the past half century building a better car from scratch, using the scientific method. That car is called the Big Five personality traits, and it meets the standards above. Across many of the world’s cultures, five personality traits consistently emerge: extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. The Big Five traits have high reliability and considerable power in predicting job performance and team effectiveness. They even have genetic and biological bases, and researchers in the emerging field of personality neuroscience have begun mapping the Big Five to relevant brain regions.

The Big Five are far from perfect, and there’s growing support for a HEXACO model of personality that adds a sixth trait: honesty-humility. Right now, though, the biggest problem facing the Big Five is one of marketing. Most people prefer to be called agreeable than disagreeable—we need to repackage this trait as supportive versus challenging. I hope some of you will take up the challenge.